The NetBSD Project recently released NetBSD 5.0, the 13th major release of its Unix operating system. If you are not familiar with the BSD mentality, it's a back-to-basics approach. In this gallery we go from install to running a GNOME desktop in a virtualised VMware instance. This process is console-based.

What are you whining about? Pkgsrc works very well on NetBSD and other Unix OSes. You have a robust and consistent framework for building the same software on BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.

What makes you say there are no binary packages? Have you even looked? Go to ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/ there are binary packages for NetBSD and a few other OSes like Solaris and QNX. There aren't any NetBSD-5 binary packages, I think because version 5 has been recently released, so they're in the process of building them. If there aren't any packages for your specific architecture, you can always build them from source, it's quite easy with pkgsrc.

Pkgsrc tools are very consistent and they all have manpages. They are already installed with the base system on NetBSD, or they get installed when you bootstrap pkgsrc on other OSes. Tools under pkgsrc/pkgtools directory are extra tools and are not required for basic package management, they can have whatever names their developer chooses, because they're not core tools.

I think you're missing the point of pkgsrc. It's supposed to work cross-platform and is a very nice framework if you have to administer different Unix OSes, like Linux, Solaris and BSD. In my opinion, the fact that pkgsrc is cross-platform doesn't interfere with it's consistency, or flexibility. Quite the opposite, because it supports so many different platforms, more people tend to use it and submit bug reports and patches, which improves the quality of software.

Sometime recently the binary tree for Solaris 10 and 11 was pulled. This was the last time I installed a binary package from there. There is now only a bootstrap tarball letting you know you're gonna have to build from source I suppose. Yeah, I'm already bootstrapped.

You sound like they charged you money for access to Solaris' binary packages and then removed those packages. I don't see other Linux or BSD projects hosting binary packages for other operating systems. It would be nice for NetBSD/pkgsrc to provide binary packages for all supported permutations of OS + hardware architecture, but they probably have limited resources, bandwidth and disk space on ftp servers.